Develop tertiary industry to help graduates

In May, the Ministry of Education said college graduates would find it more difficult to get a suitable job this year. It had reason to say so: only about 30 percent of college graduates in the three first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou had landed a job until May 1. The situation has improved in the past two and half months but is still not satisfactory.

The condition of the job market has forced graduates to drastically lower their salary expectations even in the face of rising commodity prices. According to the 2013 Chinese College Graduates Employment Pressure Report, graduates' salary expectation has dropped from 5,537.5 yuan ($902) in 2011 to 3,683.6 yuan in 2013. No wonder, the media say "this is the most difficult year for college graduates to find a job".

The plight of graduates in the job market even prompted Premier Li Keqiang to say at a State Council executive meeting on May 15 that measures should be taken to solve graduates' employment problem.

Many people say the employment rate of graduates is low because the number of graduates produced every year has increased dramatically. For example, universities in China churned out a record 6.99 million graduates this year, and in such a situation there is bound to be surplus manpower in the job market.

But the proportion of college graduates (or those with even higher education) in China's population is not that high. According to the Sixth National Population Census, conducted in April 2011, the number of people with a college diploma (or higher degree) was 119.64 million, which is less than 9 percent of the total population. This proportion is markedly lower than that in developed countries such as the United States and Japan.

The main reason why graduates find themselves as surplus manpower is China's unbalanced industrial structure. Generally speaking, tertiary industry absorbs most of the college graduates because it offers much more knowledge-intensive positions compared with primary and secondary industries. A well-developed service industry is one of the key indicators of the transformation of a country's economic structure toward a post-industrialized society, which should be China's ultimate development goal. But China's industrial structure is far from ideal.